It is now an accepted fact that the majority of financial markets worldwide are neither normal nor constant, and South Africa is no exception. One idea that can be used to understand such markets and has been gaining popularity recently is that of regimes and regime-switching models. In this...

The performance of dynamic trading and investment strategies can be difficult to predict. Although not without its problems, analysis of the historical performance of a strategy can provide valuable insight into its general risk and return properties. Furthermore, historical analysis allows one...

This paper details efforts at developing and estimating a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) econometric model representative of the financial statements of a firm. Although the model can be generalized to represent the financial statements of any firm, this work was carried out as a case study, where...

This paper focuses on two methods for optimum portfolio selection. We compare Mean-Variance method with Mean-VaR method by the means of investment simulation, based on Czech financial market data from turbulent market periods of the year 2007 and the year 2008. We compare both strategies, basing...

Under the Basel II regulatory framework non-negligible statistical problems arise when backtesting risk measures. In this setting backtests often become infeasible due to a low number of violations leading to heavy size distortions. According to Escanciano and Olmo (2010, 2011) these problems...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a dynamic Value at Risk model and high frequency realized volatility models can improve the accuracy of 1-day ahead VaR forecasting beyond the performance of frequently used models. As such, this paper constructs 60 conditional volatility...

To examine the familiar tradeoff between risk and return in financial investments, we use a rolling two-stage stochastic program to compare mean-risk optimization models with time series momentum strategies. In a backtest of allocating investment between a market index and a risk-free asset, we...

In this note, we present a simple, practical and easily implementable coverage test to backtest any spectral risk measure. Our test gives a single decision at a specified confidence level and is perfectly consistent with the binomial test for VaR. Particular attention is given to the special...